Goldfinger

Posted 25 Sep 2017

Have you played through Goldeneye to death? Well, it might be that the answer to your problems is right here. Goldfinger has been worked on since 2009 and has been released just now after 20 years of 007 Goldeneye.

The Goldfinger project began in 2009 but after some issues with a team that lost interest, it was reignited in 2011. They watched the Goldfinger movie, rewatched it, read the book, and finally came up with a set of 18 levels that would appear in the final game. The levels were taken directly from scenes in the movie and refined with details from the book, but there are no book-exclusive levels in the game (if that makes any sense). In order to make the mod, they had to create their own Goldeneye editor which is a monumental achievement on its own.

The game is a bit strange in that it’s not directly plug-and-play. You need to get the xDelta patch that is available on the Goldfinger patch page. Then you apply the patch using a delta patch using a patcher to a US Goldeneye ROM called “GoldenEye 007 (U) [!].z64”.

If you’re using an Everdrive 64, edit the ED64\save_db.txt file to have “GF=1” in the end. I didn’t do this and the game didn’t save, lesson learned.

For 64Drive force Save type to 4Kbit.

First impressions of 007 Goldfinger 64

Here’s a video of me playing through the first level of the game on Agent difficulty to get an impression of the game. Note that this is just from having played the first level. Let’s list out some of the good stuff:

The levels are all new, it feels like Goldeneye but fresh.

A whole new set of weapons makes killing guards all the more satisfying.

The character animation and graphics (textures and models) look great.

And some of the bad stuff:

There is a ~30 second loading period between the stage select screen.

Upon starting the level, the default values for sound effects and music are set to 0%, making it hard to tell when the loading finished if you go AFK.

Other settings are a bit off; auto-aim is disabled (essential to dealing with the joystick), crosshairs and ammo are also invisible by default.

The part in the first level with the silos is too big and repetitive, making it hard to visualise where you are located and which silos still need to be bombed.

Then again, I’m going to need to take a deeper look into the game to be able to give it a proper review. There are still 19 other levels and 2 more difficulties that need to be addressed.

This is a pretty big project, so I think that it would warrant some more content on N64 Squid. What do you think? Leave a comment below letting me know.

Goldfinger 64 now available for download

The mod/hack by Subdrag and co for Goldfinger is now live after 8 years in the making - and you can play it right on your Nintendo 64.